Revisiting “black” districts

Questioning a practice that has been gospel for the civil rights movement for decades, columnist Cynthia Tucker challenges the idea of creating “majority-minority” districts — legislative districts where African American voters have a clear majority.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also long supported the maximization of these high-minority districts as a way to boost African American representation in legislative bodies.

Locally, the practice is the focus of this year’s redistricting battle in Albany County. Aaron Mair, a longtime civil rights activist, has come up with a map that provides five such districts in the county legislature. The legislature approved a plan that provides four, and County Executive Mike Breslin is expected to sign it. Mair, who has fought these battles in the past two redistrictings over the last 20 years, says he’ll sue.

But Tucker, a prominent black columnist with solid civil rights creds, says she’s rethought her position on this arrangement and come to the conclusion that while, yes, majority-minority districts may be a sure way to get black politicians elected, they compartmentalize black voters, and discourage moderation in both black districts and white ones.

“…those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or –brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.

(snip)

“Hemming most black voters into a few districts also had a deleterious effect on surrounding areas, now ‘bleached’ of voters whose interests tend toward equality of opportunity. Their absence encourages pols in districts left overwhelmingly white to use the ‘Southern strategy’ of playing to the resentments of white voters still uncomfortable with decades of social change.”

The risk, though, is that with artful gerrymandering, black voters could be so dispersed that their influence is diluted and their issues unaddressed.

Is this racial gerrymandering the best solution? Or is there a better way?